By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 1, 2024 ~

Remember that time in 2016 when Attorney General Loretta Lynch decided she would take a private meeting with Bill Clinton on her plane as it was parked on the tarmac in Phoenix – while his wife, Hillary Clinton, was under federal investigation for using an unsafe private email server at her New York home to receive classified government emails when she was Secretary of State?

What President Biden’s Vice President, Kamala Harris, and his Chief of Staff, Jeff Zients, did in mid-March was equally scandalous. Harris had a “one-on-one lunch at the White House” with Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of the most crime-riddled bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase. Zients also separately met with Dimon. That reporting comes courtesy of reporters Joshua Franklin and James Politi of the Financial Times (paywall). It has not been disputed by the Biden administration.

Dimon’s private meetings in Washington come as the bank (that has already admitted to a string of five criminal felony charges) is currently facing a serious investigation for “billions” of improperly conducted trades by its federally-insured bank. Two of its federal regulators, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve, settled those charges in March for a combined $348 million. Both regulators provided extremely sketchy details as to the precise nature of the trading misconduct. JPMorgan Chase revealed in an SEC filing in February that it remains under investigation in the same matter by a third regulator “but there is no assurance that such discussions will result in a resolution,” the bank wrote in the filing.

It would certainly not be the first time that Dimon attempted to throw his weight around in Washington to get his bank out of trouble. During Congressional hearings in 2012, when Dimon was called to testify about his bank allowing its traders to use deposits from its federally-insured bank to gamble in derivatives in London and lose what eventually tallied up to $6.2 billion (the infamous “London Whale” scandal), Dimon had the temerity to wear presidential cuff links to show off a gift from the White House.

Then there was Dimon’s meeting with Attorney General Eric Holder during the Obama administration when JPMorgan Chase was being investigated for widespread mortgage fraud. For what the bank got away with in that matter, see Matt Taibbi’s report revealing that the Justice Department sandbagged their key witness, a former lawyer/ whistleblower inside JPMorgan Chase, who called it “the biggest financial cover-up in history.”

According to the recent Financial Times report, Vice President Harris did not list the luncheon on her official daily calendar, suggesting she knew it was inappropriate. The FT reporters also reveal the following:

“Dimon, one of the most influential voices on Wall Street, also separately met White House chief of staff Jeff Zients while he was in Washington, as well as federal regulators and members of Congress. It could not be learnt what was discussed at the meetings. The White House and JPMorgan, the largest US bank by assets, declined to comment.”

The only reason that Dimon is still called “one of the most influential voices on Wall Street” is because sycophants in mainstream media still call him that. Engaged Americans, like former Labor Secretary and Public Policy Professor Robert Reich, call Dimon an “oligarch” who has “hijacked the system.” Trial attorneys Helen Davis Chaitman and Lance Gotthoffer released a book, JPMadoff: The Unholy Alliance Between America’s Biggest Bank and America’s Biggest Crook, in which they provided this take on Dimon:

“In Chapter 4, we compared JPMC [JPMorgan Chase] to the Gambino crime family to demonstrate the many areas in which these two organizations had the same goals and strategies. In fact, the most significant difference between JPMC and the Gambino Crime Family is the way the government treats them. While Congress made it a national priority to eradicate organized crime, there is an appalling lack of appetite in Washington to decriminalize Wall Street. Congress and the executive branch of the government seem determined to protect Wall Street criminals, which simply assures their proliferation…

“If Jamie Dimon is running a criminal institution, he should be prosecuted for it. And law enforcement has the perfect tool for such a prosecution: the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations ACT (RICO).”

In 2014, the non-profit watchdog, Better Markets, filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice and the man who sat at its helm, Attorney General Eric Holder. The lawsuit challenged what had emerged out of that cozy meeting between Holder and Dimon – a $13 billion out-of-court settlement over the bank’s sale of toxic mortgages.

Better Markets wrote on its website that this was at the time “The largest settlement in U.S. history from a single entity by more than 300%” and that it “granted JP Morgan blanket civil immunity for years of alleged, but undisclosed, pervasive, egregious and knowing fraudulent and illegal conduct that contributed to the 2008 financial crash and the worst economy since the Great Depression.”

Among the allegations in the Better Markets’ press release, these three stood out:

“The Attorney General and other senior DOJ political appointees negotiated directly and entirely in secret with the CEO of JP Morgan Chase [Jamie Dimon], someone who was considered a possible Treasury Secretary just a few years ago.

“The cellphone of DOJ’s third highest ranking official rang with the ‘familiar’ phone number of JP Morgan Chase’s CEO [Jamie Dimon], who called to offer billions of dollars to stop DOJ from holding a press conference and filing a lawsuit in just a few hours. The call worked, and the press conference and lawsuit were both called off.

“DOJ gave complete civil immunity to JP Morgan Chase for defrauding thousands in exchange for $13 billion, via a contract that was negotiated and finalized in secret without any review or approval by a federal court.”

Attorneys for the Justice Department asked the federal court to dismiss the Better Markets lawsuit on the basis that Better Markets lacked standing to file the lawsuit. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia did just that in a longwinded decision that effectively stripped Americans of their ability to fight back against the increasingly corrupt nexus between Washington and Wall Street.

If you agree with Wall Street On Parade that the current banking structure in the U.S. represents a threat to national security and economic stability, please contact your U.S. Senators today via the U.S. Capitol switchboard by dialing (202) 224-3121. Tell your Senators to hold immediate hearings on the urgent need to restore the Glass-Steagall Act to separate Wall Street’s trading casinos from federally-insured commercial banks.